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Zamaan Qureshi explores new revelations from the Mueller probe into the leaking of emails hacked by Russian intelligence services to Wikileaks during the 2016 US Presidential election
Nigel Farage, former leader of UKIP, a close associate of former President Donald Trump and now the lead presenter for the new British TV channel GBNews is the subject of newly released documents from the Mueller probe.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller was tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and interviewed hundreds of witnesses to lift the veil behind a web of Trump campaign associates and employees who facilitated, aided, and welcomed foreign influence in the 2016 election.
One of the leads Mueller investigated was the attempt to acquire and release the infamous “Hillary Clinton emails” (correspondence from an email address the former U.S. Secretary of State set up with on a private server) as well as the DNC emails hacked by Guccifer 2.0 – a Russian intelligence agency hacker – and subsequently passed on to Wikileaks.
The release of these emails was thought to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump politically. Though Clinton was cleared of wrongdoing by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2016, the Trump campaign sought access to these emails from Wikileaks.
On Monday, the FBI removed some redactions on over 400 pages of memos recounting interviews conducted by the Special Counsel’s office. It’s part of an ongoing lawsuit filed by Jason Leopold of Buzzfeed News and CNN against the FBI to remove redactions on both the Mueller report and its supporting documents.
Most of the redactions that were removed Monday related to Roger Stone, the Trump associate and political consultant, and his attempts to gain access to Clinton’s emails via Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. According to the revealed documents and the Mueller report, Stone believed Nigel Farage may have been able to connect him to Assange to acquire Clinton’s emails.
Mueller Report
Nigel Farage’s name appears only once in the Special Counsel’s final report into Russian interference published two years ago. On page 55, the report outlines how Jerome Corsi, an American author and conspiracy theorist and associate of Roger Stone, approached fellow American author Ted Malloch to interview Julian Assange about the leaks.
The original report only outlines how the Special Counsel’s Office understood Corsi believed Malloch had connections or relationships with people in the “orbit” of Nigel Farage, who may have been able to contact Julian Assange.
However, the newly removed redactions on the FD-302 memos (interviews conducted with witnesses), colloquially known as “302’s”, to the Mueller report add another layer to what information the two were seeking. Jerome Corsi and Ted Malloch gave separate interviews to the FBI and Special Counsel’s Office and their understanding of events varied.
Corsi gave multiple days worth of testimony to agents and lawyers from the FBI and Special Counsel’s Office. Beginning on 31 October 31 2018, at the Special Counsel’s Office in Washington D.C., Corsi gave a series of statements to investigators that he would later walk back. That day, he told investigators that he and Malloch had not discussed Farage in the context of Assange on a Facetime call and discussed only Farage in other Brexit related matters.